Kash Patel Claims Local Arrests As His Own To Boost FBI Crime Stats
At best, most Trump administration officials can be called sycophants." At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic Peter Principles... the list goes on and on.
FBI director Kash Patel fits into many of these shoes, even if he may not fit quite as well into his pair of Trump-purchased Florsheims. Charlatan" fits the most here, but it's a direct byproduct of Patel's narcissism and sycophancy.
It behooves Patel to pretend his FBI is the best FBI that has ever been. And if he can't do that, he should at least pretend the FBI is the most Trump that it has ever been. He's done a lot for the latter part of the previous sentence. This time, he's trying to both, but focusing on portraying his leadership as the most leader-y the FBI has ever seen.
But he can't do it alone. It's a team effort, even though most of the team's contributions won't be publicly recognized. This is all about elevating Patel and his Trump-subservient FBI to a level that might be publicly recognized by a guy who rarely has anything good to say about anyone other than himself: the President of the United States.
Those who can't, steal... apparently.
Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90% increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn't mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.
Many of those arrests are not FBI cases, the FBI acknowledges.
I would like to see more detail on what is considered to be present" in this context. Some agent on FaceTime? An arrest culminating in a Teams meeting with a nearby special agent? Somebody just wrote an FBI agent's name on the paperwork at some point? This one time a cop got an email?
Even if someone from the FBI was physically present before, during, or after the arrest, it's not really an FBI case if the FBI isn't handling the arrest and processing and handing it over to the US DOJ for prosecution. The FBI may assist to a limited extent in hundreds or thousands of criminal arrests. But just because someone talked to a fed at some point during the investigation, it's absolute bullshit to claim these arrests as your own, especially when you don't really care about the arrests, but rather that the numbers seem higher than those produced by the previous administration.
And those numbers aren't actually higher, not when you strip out Patel's stolen valor.
In reality, the FBI has referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during the second Trump administration than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15% fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.
And you do know why this is, right? Tons of federal crimes happen every day. But the Trump DOJ and FBI only care about certain crimes - things like alleged voting by non-citizens, whatever new awful iteration of immigration enforcement is taking place, and anything that can possibly be wielded against Trump's personal and political enemies. Everything else can sit quietly in the back and stfu until the next regime change.
Even if we decide this FBI is better than all the FBIs that have come before it, chortling on main about these arrests is like congratulating yourself for composing a social media post without a noticeable typo. This contribution" - as bogusly exaggerated as it is - only shows that the FBI remains operational, if only barely:
Patel's count of the FBI making or participating in 54,000 arrests shrinks in significance when taken into broader context. There have been 11.3 million arrests nationwide since January 2025, according to the same FBI data.
If you're bragging about contributing to 0.5% of all arrests, you're doing bragging wrong. If you're just trying to look better than Biden's FBI, you're still failing because the increase you're touting is imaginary. It can't be claimed without claiming work by local law enforcement as your own. But what else would we expect from a guy who thinks he's entitled to drink with Olympic champions just because he's got a free ride to the arena?